The outbreak of the war found my wife and me in Switzerland, where we were taking a cure.

IN trying to recall my impressions during my short war duty as an officer in the Austrian Army, I find that my recollections of this period are very uneven and confused.

Doves oppose war on the grounds that the risks exceed the gains. War with Iraq could be very costly, possibly degenerating into urban warfare.

How is the world ruled and led to war? Diplomats lie to journalists and believe these lies when they see them in print.

People were very affected by the war. But it didn't mean you stopped painting unless you were called into the Army; then you just couldn't paint. But otherwise one continued.

Hungary is, in a word, in a state of WAR against the Hapsburg dynasty, a war of legitimate defence, by which alone it can ever regain independence and freedom.

My level of cynicism about the reasons that took us to war against Iraq remain just as well-developed as they were before I went.

My father, who had lost a brother, fighting on the Austrian side in World War I, was a committed pacifist.

However, while the Nazi barbarians and their collaborators threatened the entire world, I could not accept his philosophy and, after several earlier attempts, was finally accepted into the Canadian Infantry Corps during the last year of World War II.

I was born in 1923 into a middle class Jewish family in Vienna, a few years after the end of World War I, which was disastrous from the Austrian point of view.

Even as we pour hundreds of billions of dollars into our efforts in the Middle East, there is much that needs to be done to win the war of ideas in the Muslim world and beyond.

Peace must be more than the absence of war.

The most persistent sound which reverberates through man's history is the beating of war drums.

After a Polish Pope, whose country was first to be invaded by the Germans in World War Two, we now have someone from the generation drafted at the close of the war.

I love painting and music, of course. I don't know nearly as much about them as I know about poetry. I've certainly been influenced by fiction. I was overwhelmed by War and Peace when I read it, and I didn't read it until I was in my late 20s.